Stupid Paradoxes
by amdragjakelong'sgurl
Summary: A tale of Inception Epicness told from the view of a Mary Sue OC. If you're gonna bash, I'll laugh at you. Anyway this is an Arthur/oc story between Arthur's and his sister's crazy extractor best friend. During and after the movie. Please Review!
1. Chapter 1

I glanced at Arthur, Nash, and then my watch. It was time. I pulled headphones out of my bag, and placed them delicately on Nash's ears, determined not to disturb him despite knowing I couldn't. I pressed play and closed my eyes as Non, Je ne regrette rien by Edith Piaf played quietly. It was almost time. Someone would wake up soon.

I was right. Arthur opened his eyes and sat up, going straight to the dream machine.

"Arthur?"

"Not now, Dyl. It didn't go well. Watch Nash." I nodded and bit my lip at the short tone he used with me. Then I rolled my eyes. The second Nash wok up I hit him in the head.

"What did you do!"

"The asshole messed up the simple rug!"

"Well I didn't know he was gonna rub his damn face on it!" Nash protested.

"Enough!" Dom was up, so Arthur rounded on him.

"You. What was that all about?"

"I have it under control."

"I'd hate to see you out of control."

"Guys, we don't have time for this!" I pulled my hair(Which is black, blue, purple and white, if you're wondering) into a ponytail.

"You're right, Dylan. I'm getting off at Kyoto. Stay with Arthur." Dom ordered. Arthur barely raised his head as he agreed with this.

"He's not going to check every compartment, Cobb."

"He doesn't like trains." I shrugged.

"It's every man for himself. Arthur, keep her safe?"

"Always."

And Arthur wouldn't let me out of his sight until we got to the hotel. He knocked on the door he knew Cobb was in.

"Hey. Ride is on the roof." He stayed at the door while I walked into the room with my gaurdian.

"Right."

"You okay?" I crossed my arms.

"Yeah." Dom looked up from the bag he was packing. "Why?"

"Arthur told me bout the dream. Mal showed up..."

"Yeah. I'm sorry about his leg."

"Dom, it's getting worse."

"One apology is all you're getting princess. Does Sophie know where we're going?"

"Yep."

Dom nodded and put his hand on the small of my back, ushering me over to Arthur. Arthur's warm hand replaced Dom's slightly cold one.

"Where's Nash?" He asked quickly. I shook my head.

"He hasn't shown. You wanna wait?" Arthur took my bag off my shoulder and held it with his own.

"No. We were supposed deliver Saito's expansion plans to COBOL Engineering two hours ago. By now they know we've failed. It's time to disappear."

Dom hurried us up to the roof.

"Where are you going to go?" Arthur asked quietly, glancing at me as he spoke.

"Buenos can lie low there, maybe sniff out a job when things quiet down. You?"

"Stateside."

"Send our regards." Dom and I weren't allowed in the States anymore. Not since Mal...

The helicopter opened it's door. Nash was sitting in the seat, wide eyed and terrified. Saito was opposite him, smiling wickedly.

"He sold you out. Thought to come to me and bargain for his life. So I offer you the satisfaction."

One of Saito's goons held a gun out to Dom. He shook his head.

"That's not the way I deal with things."

Saito blinked once, and knocked on his window. Two things happened at once. The helicopter turned on and two of Saito's goons pulled Nash out of the seat.

"I'm sorry, Dom. Nash was my call." I mumbled, climbing into the copter. Arthur glared at Saito and wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

"Don't worry about it." Dom turned to Saito. "What will you do with him?"

"Nothing. But I can't speak for COBOL Engineering."

They flew away, Arthur getting increasingly more tense as they went.

"What do you want?" Dom demanded.

"Inception." Saito responded instantly. "Is it possible?"

"Of course not!" Arthur snapped. Dom and I shared a look.

"If you can steal an idea from some one's mind why can't you plant one there instead?"

"Alright. Here's me planting an idea into your head. I say 'Don't think about elephants.' What are you thinking about?"

"...Elephants."

"Right but it's not your idea, because you know I gave it to you. The subject's mind can always trace the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake."

"That's not true." Dom sighed. We were both looking out of the windows.

"Can you do it." Saito smirked at Dom first, and then me.

"Are you offering us a choice?" I snapped. "Because we can find our own way to square things with COBOL."

"Then you have a choice."

"I choose to leave, Sir."

Saito nodded, and ordered the pilot to land. As we all piled out, Arthur, Dom and I, that is, Saito called out to us.

"Hey, Mr. Cobb, Ms. Nicole...How would you like to go home? To America, to James and Phillipa. To see your friend Sophia, again, Dylan?"

"You can't fix that," Dom shouted over the sound of the helicopter. "No one can!"

"Just like inception."

"Cobb, Dyl, come on!"

I hesitated, and then walked forward to Saito.

"How complex is the idea?"

"Simple enough."

"No idea is simple when you're planting it into someone else's brain."

"My main competitor is an old man in poor health. His son will soon inherit control of the corporation. I need him to decide to break up his fathers empire."

"Dylan, we should walk away from this!" Arthur urged.

"Hold on." Dom walked over and put his hand on top of my head. "If we do this...If-if we even could do it, how do I know you can deliver?"

"You don't." Saito responded. "But I can. So...Do you want to take a leap of faith...or wait to become old, filled with regret waiting to die." Saito's eyes flashed up from my face to where Arthur stood behind me. "Alone."

Dom looked at me, and then we both nodded.

"Very well. Assemble your team, and choose your people more wisely." Saito smirked and pulled the door closed. The copter took off again, this time without us."

XxX

Arthur took a seat next to me on the plane, after getting bored of watching Dom daydream.

"Look, Dyl, I know how bad you wanna go home. How bad you wanna see Soph, and James and Phillipa. This can't be done."

"Oh, yes it can, Arthur. You just have to go deep enough."

"You don't know that!"

"He's done it before!"

"Who'd he do it to?" Arthur got closer. I rolled my purple eyes and scooted away. He rolled his eyes as well. "Why are we going to Paris?"

"We are going to need a new architect." I opened a magazine in my lap, humming my favorite song. B-E-A-utiful, by Meagan Nicole.

XxX

"You never did like your office, did you?"

Miles looked up and saw me sitting in the seats of his lecture hall.

"There isn't enough room to think in that broom cupboard...Is Dom here? Is it safe for you two to be here?"

"Extradition between France and the US is a bureaucratic nightmare, you know that." I stood and made my way all the way down to his desk.

"I think they'd make an exception in you case, Dylan Nicole."

"Uh- Look, Dom bought these for you to give them to the kids, when you have a chance."

"You and I both know it's going to take more than the occasional stuffed animal to convince those kids they still have a father. You send Sophie letters on a daily basis to give them, and you call them when you can, but Dom? Tickle Me Elmo and a few Barbie dolls."

"He tries, Gramps he really does." I placed my palms on his desk. "Says he's doing what you taught him and through him you taught me."

"I never taught either of you to be thieves."

"No, but you taught him how to navigate minds. But after what happened there weren't a whole lot of legitimate ways for us to use that skill."

"What are you doing here, Dylan?"

I bit my lip and sighed.

"We may have found a way home. It's a job for some very, very powerful people. People who Dom believes can fix our charges permanently! But we need your help."

"Dom sent you here to corrupt one of my brightest and best, didn't he?"

"And to...ya know...Give the kids Elmo and Barbie... Anyways you know what we offer. It's their choice."

Miles chuckled deeply.

"Money?"

"More than the money! It's the chance to build cathedrals entire cities things that never existed and things that couldn't exist."

"So he wants me to let someone else follow you both into his fantasy?"

"They're not going to actually come into the dream. Just design the levels and teach them to the dreamers. That's it."

"Dom can design them himself. Or you can."

"Mal won't let Dom; Dom won't let me."

"He's dragging you out of reality, Dylan."

"Reality?" I scoffed. "Those kids, your grandchildren? They're waiting for their father to come home. Sophie? She's waiting for her best friend, because having Arthur isn't enough! That's their reality. And this job? This last job? That's how we get there! You know me, gramps, I actually think shit through and I wouldn't be here if I knew any other way! We need an architect who's as good as Dom was."

Miles looked at me long and hard before grinning, slipping his glasses on.

"I've got somebody better!"


	2. Chapter 2

"Ariadne?" Miles waved a young looking girl over. She couldn't have been more the 19, and my instant thought was that she could be better than Dom. Her hair was brown, reaching to about mid back, and she was thin in figure, as opposed to my own curvy figure. "I'd like you to meet Dylan Nicole."

"Pleased to meet you." She smiled nervously.

"If you have a few minutes, Dylan would like to talk to you about a job offer."

"A work placement?"

"Not exactly..." I grinned.

XxX

"I have a test for you." I told Ariadne. I had taken her out of the campus and pulled a pad and pen out of my bag.

"You aren't going to tell me anything about this first?"

I scoffed.

"Before I tell you anything about the job, I need to know that you can do it. You have two minutes. Make me a maze that takes more than one minute to solve." I handed her the paper.

The first maze Ariadne drew was too easy. It took about ten seconds to solve.

"Try again." I handed the pad and paper back. The next maze wasn't any better. It took thirty seconds.

"You're going to have to do better than that."

She snatched the pad out of my hand and drew a huge spiral, before putting small lines at random intervals.

"Stop."

She smirked as she handed me the pad. I completed the maze in just over a minute.

"Alright."I crossed my arms. I led her to a small coffee shop and sat her at a table. But little did she know... "They say we only use a fraction of our brains true potential. But that's when we're awake. When we're asleep, our mind can do almost anything."

"Such as?"

"Well, imagine you're designing a building, you conciously create each aspect. But sometimes it feels like it's almost creating itself. If you know what I mean."

"Yeah, yeah. Like I'm...Discovering it."

"Genuine inspiration, right?" I pulled the marker back out of my pocket. "Now in a dream, our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously." I drew two arrows in a cycle. "And our mind does this so well that we don't even know it's happening. That allows us to get right into the middle of that process."

"How?"

"By taking over the creating part. Now this is where we need you. You create the world of the dream and you bring the subject into it, and they fill it with thier subconcious."

"How could I ever aquire enough detail to make them think it's real?"

"Well, dreams...The feel real when we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."

Ariadne stared blankly at me. I rolled my eyes and tried to think like Sophie or Dom.

"Okay. So, you never remember the beginning of a dream right? You're always just kind of in the middle."

"I guess, yeah..."

"So how did you get here?"

"We just came from the uh...-" Ariadne cut herself off, blinking in surprise.

"Think about it Ariadne, how did you get here? In this place right now. Where are you right now?"

Ariadne began looking around and I sat back in my seat. Then she turned back to look at me and we leaned close.

"We're dreaming?"

"We're actually in the middle of a workshop right now, sleeping. This is your first lesson in shared dreaming. Be calm."

Everything began exploding around us, the table shook, the buildings blew up. The dream began collapsing. I grinned and covered my head as heard what I have long since dubbed the Kick song, since I didn't like repeating the french name over and over again.

"If it's just a dream than why are you-" She cut herself off as the wall directly behind them imploded and efectively 'killed' both of us.

Ariadne's eyes snapped open. Arthur came to my side helping to pull me out of the lawn chair. I was laying in.

"Because it's never just a dream is it? And a face full of glass hurts like hell. When you're in it, it feels real! Thanks for being calm by the way."

"It's why the military invented dream sharing. A training program where soldiers can shoot and stab and strangle eachother and then wake up." Arthur added.

"How did architects become involved?" Ariadne asked, once she caught her breath.

"Well," Dom handed us both a bottle of water as he answered. "Someone had to design the dreams, right?"

"Arthur, give us another five minutes?" I looked up at him and smiled. He handed me the IV.

"Five minutes? We were talking for like an hour, how-"

"When you sleep, your mind functions more quickly, therefore time seems to feel more slow.

"Five minutes in the real world equals an hour in the dream." Arthur stood by the machine.

"Why don't you see what you can get up to in five minutes." Dom suggested. Ariadne took a deep breath and nodded. Arthur then nodded at me. I closed my eyes and fell into the dream.

"So you've got the basic layout." I walked a few paces behind Ariadne as we walked down the cobblestone streets. "Bookstore, cafe. Almost everythig else is here too."

"Well, who are the people?"

"Projections of my self-concious."

"Yours?"

"Yep. You're the dreamer. You create the dream. I'm the subject, my mind fills the voids. You can literally talk to my subconcious, that's one of the ways we extract information."

"How else do you do it?"

"We create something secure; safe. A bank vault, maybe a jail. The mind fills it with information it's trying to protect."

"And then you break in and steal it?"

"Well... Yeah."

"I guess I thought the dream space would be all about the visual but it's more about the feel of it. My question is what happens when you start messing with the physics of it all?"

Ariadne paused, and her mind began working wonders. She looked wide eyed back at me and I smirked as the earth in front of them bent skyward, the tops of buildings connecting to the tops of buildings, boxing us in.

"It's something, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is." I agreed quietly. Then I smirked wider, remembering what happens when you change too much. We stepped up onto the road she'd just changed. All projections of my subconcious were now looking right at her.

"Why are they all looking at me?"

"Because my subconcious feels that someone else is creating this world. The more you change the quicker the projections catch onto deception."

"What?"

"They sense the foregin nature of the dreamer and they attack like white blood cells fighting an infection."

"What, they're gonna attack us?" Ariadne scoffed.

"Oh, no, no." I grinned. I shook my head. 'Just you.'

We approached a bridge that Ariadne made for herself.

"Oh, this is great, but if you keep changing things like this-" I cut myself off as she jogged up the stairs.

"Jeeze!" A projection bumped shoulders with Ariadne. "Mind telling your subconcious to take it easy?"

"It's my subconcious. I can't control it!"

Ariadne continued to ignore me as she pulled huge mirrors out of nowhere and created her own illusion. Then she shattered it, just like that.

"Impressive..." A distant memory flodded it's way into my brain, of Dom and Mal standing on this bridge while I took a picture of them with a goofy grin on my face. "I know this bridge. Ariadne, this is a real place!"

"Yeah, I cross it every day to get to the college!" She called back, not really listening.

"Never recreate places from memory. Always imagine someplace new!"

"Well you gotta draw from stuff you know, right?"

"Only use details a streetlamp, or a phone booth. Not an entire area!"

"Well why not?" Ariadne snapped. I rolled my eyes and looked down at my bracelet, satisfied to see the four colors switching from one glass bead to the next. The Totem has spoken. I'm dreaming.

"Because creating a dream from memory is the easiest way to loose your grasp on what's real and what is a dream."

"Is that what happened to Cobb?"

"Listen to me!" I grabbed her arm. A projection came and grabbed her away from me, taking three to hold me back. I saw Mal approaching rapidly and Ariadne was screaming for me to wake her up. As if I could.

"Damn it Mal!" I was a little stronger than my own subconcious, pulling on the six hands that were holding me down. "MAL NO!"

Mal stabbed Ariadne once, and it was over quickly. I rolled my eyes skyward and hopped that Arthur would explain to her.

I woke up soon after, and sat up from my chair.

"...Mal..."

This caused Dom to stand up and walk out of the room to think, calling as he went,

"She needs a Totem."

"WHAT?" Ariadne was still paniking. Arthur was tending to her awkwardly.

"A Totem- A small personal-"

I breathed a sigh.

"That's some subconcious you've got, Dylan! She's a real charmer."

I rolled my eyes and Arthur made a noise of realization.

"I see you've met Mal. Dyl, go take a breather."

I nodded, walking out of the warehouse, leaning on the rails. I groaned an put my hand over my eyes.

"Damn it, Mal."


End file.
